Maybe they know what they’re talking about.

The teacher, the students, the presenter, the attendees, the guy running the zoom breakout rooms… they all seem to know what’s going on, nodding along in agreement.

But,

“I just don’t get it.”

Meanwhile, you might quietly stew in some sense of shame bubbling into daydreams, as you nod along with the rest of the room, not even realizing that you’re doing so.

Maybe you hope it will all come together later. But, it’s all to easy to check out. Distraction readily follows disconnect.

So you might wonder:

“What’s wrong with me?”

The trouble is often not the information itself. It’s the lack of time and play:

• the time to acknowledge the fundamentals and
• the play with challenges in tune with where we are now.

Whatever information flies at us from the front of the room, it’s that attunement that can make a tremendous difference.

Wandering minds tend to connect deeply with an experience of the Now. Many feel less scatter and stronger engagement while in nature, for example. They feel the fundamentals and how they bloom into detail more viscerally. It’s where things make sense.

Without the fundamentals and the time to play with them, we can easily get lost.

Make me recite a hundred rules, and I’ll fail. But if I can find the commonalities between them, I can quote them all and maybe discover more.

Memorizing notes by rote causes them to fall like dead leaves. But reaching the musical spirit behind them finds fingers in flow over the keys.

When exploring a new board game, rhythms of natural curiosity can thread through initial confusions to find where things “click.”

While it may be tempting to blame others–teachers, teammates, or employers–for not having the perfect capacity to tune into us, we can instead recognize that wandering minds are often fueled by a spirit of play reveling in nature and the fundamentals.

It lets us shift to a more positive:

“How can I figure this out for myself?”

“How can this mean something to me?”

We don’t need to leave the classroom.

Instead, no longer a passive receptacle, now with curiosity a stalwart guide, we can raise our hand with questions:

• What are the fundamentals here?
• How do they come together?
• Where do they connect to what I know?
• What do I need to know before this?

Certainly, treading through the worries of embarrassment or shame of not knowing are not simple, but connecting to an inherent sense of what makes sense and what does not, gives us a compass to find those fundamentals where we can play, learn, and thrive.

– Kourosh

PS The Waves of Focus are exactly about guiding a wandering mind through the fundamentals to play and engage in your time, to build your ship to sail where you want to go.

I’ve just set up a 7-day $20 trial for the Waves of Focus. Do you want to know what it’s all about? Come by and check it out. If you don’t like it, simply cancel before the week is out to avoid the full membership fee.